What Horrors Have Wrought
by JustAPunter
Summary: Memories are nightmares when you can't tell one from the other. Sometimes writing them down is the only way to separate them, or determine if they're one and the same. As Bucky Barnes tries to run from his past, he begins to discover its truths. (One-shot, takes place between TWS and CW.)
_Don't fall off! Don't fall!_

" _BUCKY! Hang on! Grab my hand!"_

He lurched awake, flailing in the near darkness, as the world tilted around him. A high-pitched, terrifyingly familiar screech filled the air, so loud and so close that he couldn't pinpoint its exact location. His breath came in gulps and gasps as the panic gripped him; his hands reached desperately for something- anything- to hold onto as the hard floor pitched sideways, threatening to toss him into the abyss that he knew, somehow _knew,_ was just inches away. But there was nothing to hold, nothing to grab, just the flat, hard floor beneath him and he was rolling, sliding toward that horrendous fall…

Then, as suddenly as it began, the wild careening eased and the screeching faded, replaced by a rhythmic swaying and a steady _click-clack, click-clack._

He was on a train. He closed his eyes and rolled onto his back, throwing an arm across his face as he tried to remember everything. His pulse began to slow, blood pounding in his ears, chest heaving as he caught his breath. He was on a train, a stowaway, and had been for several days. He slowly remembered that this wasn't the first time he had been awakened, panic-stricken, by a sharp turn. Every time, the screeching of metal on metal, the roar of the wind against the side of the boxcar, the shifting of the floor beneath him brought something dark and terrifying close to the surface of his memories… but never close enough to remember or understand what had been so horrific.

This was the third night in a row that it had happened; the third night on this train. But there was something different this time, something new: that voice. It hadn't been the first time he'd heard it; it surfaced often in the dreams or half-recalled memories that plagued him. But it was the one concrete thing that he had to hold onto, the one thing that linked him back solidly to who he really was… or at least, who he had been. He had seen the man to whom this voice belonged. Seen him, yes… and spoken to him, fought with him, and even tried to kill him.

And then, for some unfathomable reason, he had saved his life.

He didn't know why at the time. Maybe it was because of the way he'd spoken to him: addressing him as if he knew him, as if _the mission_ wasn't the most prevalent thing in the world. Maybe it had been the way he'd looked at him: not with fear, as his victims and some of his keepers so often did. The man had done both with some sense of hope; some sense of desperation to reach him. He had looked at him and spoken to him like he _knew_ him. But how was that possible? No one knew him: he was a secret, he was dangerous; he was not entirely human. He was an _asset._ No one like him could have a past that included _knowing_ someone.

He hadn't understood at the time. What he did know is that the encounter had set him on his current path.

The unavoidable news reports that flooded the world's media after the battle over the Potomac had told him that this man in the strange- yet familiar- red, white, and blue suit was called Captain America. The name had triggered something, but like the ingredients of a boiling soup, it surfaced only for a split second before disappearing into the roiling contents of his mind. Inadvertently, he had begun this journey as he followed every mention of that name that he could, quickly winding up at the Smithsonian where he learned the unfathomable link between himself and this Captain America… or Steve Rogers, as he had been known once upon a time.

A time when _he_ had been known as James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes. And they had more than known each other; they had been _friends._

Unable to absorb the deluge of information and details, he had shoplifted a small notebook and a pen from the Smithsonian gift shop. Over the course of the next few days, while hiding out in a derelict building on the outskirts of Washington, DC, he had written everything he could remember from the plaques and short films he'd seen. His own thoughts and memories began coming to him rapidly at that point and he had quickly run out of pages. Once again, he'd stooped to shoplifting for what he needed: a number of notebooks, pens, paper, and a backpack to carry it all, following the trail eventually back to Brooklyn, New York.

Things had gotten overwhelming there. So much that was familiar; so much that should have been there that wasn't. Old memories betrayed him as places that should have been one thing turned alien when he encountered them. He had run, fled the city by sea, running east to someplace that wouldn't haunt him the way Brooklyn and Washington had. And all the while dreaming, remembering in fragments, and writing, writing, writing…

He rolled onto his side, his left hand sending half a dozen sparks skittering across the floor as it scraped against the boxcar's metal floor, and pushed himself into a sitting position. He reached for the straps of that pilfered backpack, slung across his shoulders where he kept it whenever he wasn't writing. He pulled it off and unzipped it, fumbling inside it in the low light of the early morning. His hand grazed the worn cover of the smallest- and oldest- of the books. He had opened and closed it so many times that he knew it by touch alone now. Passing it by, his fingers came to rest on the smooth cover of the spiral notebook he was currently using; only identifiable in the murky early morning by the pen jammed into its wire binding. He pulled it out, zipped the backpack, and placed it snugly back across his shoulders.

He scooted toward the back wall of the car, away from the doors and the unease he felt whenever he was near them. He sighed, peering through the slats to his left at the gradually lightening sky. The jagged peaks of a massive mountain range obscured most of it, and this triggered another spike of unease that momentarily set his pulse racing. Somehow associated with this train; it just _had_ to be. He ran his hand through his hair, briefly thinking how good a shower and shave would feel, then bent to the task of recording his dreams/memories/thoughts.

He had a fear of trains. Being inside a train traveling through the mountains was worse. Being in side a train traveling through the mountains and being thrown off balance as it speeds around corners was the stuff of nightmares. Literally.

Eventually enough daylight seeped through the crevices between the slats of the boxcar to allow him to see the notebook's lined pages. He began to write.

 _I dreamed of falling from the train again. I'm pretty sure it had something to do with being in the mountains. But this time, I could hear Rogers's voice. He was telling me to hold on, trying to keep me from falling. But I fell anyway. It might have just been a dream, but it didn't feel like it. I've been getting more uncomfortable on this thing as it travels through the mountains. I'm pretty sure something awful happened to me on a train once, but I have no idea what. Or when. But it must have been a long time ago._

It was a short entry, but it was all he had to go on right now. He flipped back a few pages to when he had first boarded this train. He remembered that there had been an announcement happening on a loudspeaker as he clambered into the near-empty freight car under the cover of a starless, rainy night. The announcement had been a warning to pedestrians cautioning them against crossing the tracks in unmarked areas. The announcement had been in French, and he had understood every word.

 _I understand French_ was the first thing he'd written after tucking himself behind a stack of crates on the far side of the car. That had been the first night he had experienced the dream of falling off the train into the horrific void that he knew, beyond all question, awaited him. It was strange, after waking, to think how certain that void and the death it promised, seemed. It couldn't be real, not on this train. He could look through the slats and see the ground outside. But that didn't keep the nightmares (or memories, or whatever they were) from coming back every night.

For the time being, he had nothing left to write, and nothing else to do. He returned the notebook and pen to the backpack, withdrawing the worn black baseball cap he'd placed inside it when he'd gone to sleep the night before. Holding back the locks of hair that had strayed from behind his ears with one hand, he jammed the cap down firmly on his head with the other.

Again he sighed, drawing his knees to his chest as he watched the day break across the snow-capped mountains in the east. The sun cast a myriad of colors across the frozen landscape as it climbed from the horizon: golds, pinks, blues, and finally crisp white as the brilliant orb lifted itself from the edge of the world.

At some point that morning, he dozed off. He didn't dream this time, but he was jostled awake again when the train game to a slow, shuddering halt. There were sounds of other trains: distant horns blaring, the ghostly screech of wheels against rails, and occasional deep, rough, raised voices.

A train yard. He had come to the end of the line on this particular train.

As soon as he was sure that the train had stopped completely, he crept to the door on the right side of the car. He went silent and still after laying a hand on the sliding wooden door, listening for any indication of people near the train. When he was certain there was no one, he pushed the door open just enough to slip through and jump to the ground outside.

A light snow had fallen, and his boots- once black, now worn to a tired charcoal gray from the countless miles he had walked in them- left prints in the white powder as he crossed the switch yard. Even though it was early, the bright sun overhead promised enough warmth to melt it within an hour. He wasn't worried about being tracked. He reached the edge of the yard and discovered a high chain link fence bordered it. By the bends and holes in its mesh, it was easy to surmise that he was not the only one who had stowed away on these trains, and he utilized one of the gaps to exit the yard.

He found himself on a two-lane stretch of asphalt leading into the yard's parking lot in one direction and away over a hill in the other. He chose the direction of the hill. He hadn't been walking for five minutes when he saw the sign along the roadside: a simple white rectangle edged in black with an arrow pointing ahead:

 _Bucuresti._

Down the road and around a bend he came across another; this one blue with white printing, accompanied by the unmistakable logo of a jet airliner and an arrow pointing off in another direction:

 _Aeroportul International Henri Coanda Bucuresti._

He picked up his pace, swinging his backpack from his shoulders to once again remove the spiral notebook. This time the writing was not as tidy as most of his previous entries, as he wrote while he was walking.

 _I understand Romanian._


End file.
